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How to Sell Your Music Online

There are various diverse methodologies you can take to offering your music online as downloads on the web. These can supplement the salary of a musician. Aside from the undeniable decisions, there are other, conceivably more alluring thoughts being created and developed on the web.

The first traditional approach is to sign-up to a single website service who sell a artists music on their behalf and take a commission for each sale. They often hold the earnings for a period of time till they have reached a certain sales figure, before making payments.

One preferred standpoint is that they typically don’t request any join charges or month to month expenses, so if the craftsman doesn’t offer any music, they haven’t lost any cash. In the event that they are little sites, they may give you more advanced than the enormous young men.
The disadvantages are that the amount one can earn per track is a lot less than the retail price charged because the service takes a percentage, the prices are often, but not always, charged at a fixed rate set by the web service. Also, an artist won’t get the money straight away and will invariably have to wait for sales to reach a certain figure before they get paid.

A more recent approach in the last few years is to use a digital distributor, who for a fee will place an artist’s music in a number of large well known digital stores. This has the advantage of stocking music in all these stores in one fell swoop, placing music in all these services. The distributor will then collect all the money and from each service and make one single payment to the artist, normally each quarter.

The disadvantage is the artist has to wait many months after having paid, to get music on these services without any guarantees that they will sell anything. Also, there is definitely no control over the price an artist’s track is sold at, as this is totally dictated by the web services. Also again they have to wait for payments to be made, holding up cash flow whilst they wait. Again after commissioning the amount they earn is considerably less than via the diy method. iTunes is doing have the benefits of hype and artist cling to the hope that if they were on there they will somehow sell music, many artists can not understand why once they were on a big music download service, they’re not automatically selling loads of music.

With these big sites they are competing for attention with millions of other artists, the chances of casual browsers discovering and then buying their music are like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s only the known of artists with some promotional clout and a lot of backing from a label, who will get exposure and the vicious circle continues, even smaller independents have recently campaigned for equal exposure on these services, so as a totally independent artist the exposure is even worse and the odds stacked against them.

What invariably happens is the independent musician has to promote his own music and send fans and customers to his or her page on these services, whilst the service gives the artist no exposure, unless by the sheer volume of sales the independent bands selling mp3s can buck the trend and rise in the charts, so listeners become aware of them.

The newer and savvier approach is to use a service that enables musicians to take more control and make more money. From a business savvy point of view, the music hosting approach is one way to go, enabling artists to Sell Music Online. The advantage of this kind of service is the artist get’s paid straight away directly to their own PayPal accounts, artists can charge what they want and even double or even triple earnings, compared with some other services. Also, they can get set up almost immediately. When bands discover that they can generate sales themselves through social networking, gigs, and word of mouth, they begin to realize that they are driving the sales and in fairness should be making more money.

These music services charge a flat monthly service charge for hosting the music, rates vary depending on the number songs but prices start at £5 per month approximately $7.50. They charge no commission, so artists make 100% of all sales.

Many artists have used PayPal to sell their own music CD’s for this very same reason and been happy with the independence it brings and extra earnings it generates and the direct customer contact. The issue with selling digital music is it requires some quite sophisticated technology to deliver the music to the customer after the payment is made. This means delivering an instant download link once the payment is completed, which will expire, so people can’t share the link, it means providing a dedicated fast download speed to the customer and also providing the customer with a password so they can download the file again if they lose it. For these reasons, it’s far most cost effective and convenient to use a specialist service.

Also, the services often provide a music player so people can preview the music and also a mp3 music widget which can be placed anywhere to promote music with a link directly back to the artist’s sales page.